How Successful Was The Wii U Launch?

The NPD Group’s December report has finally shed light on exactly how much the Wii U has sold in the US since its launch on November 18th. Nintendo has taken the opportunity to shout about the figures – the Wii U sold 890,000 units in 6 weeks. Combine that with Media Create’s visible Japanese sales data, which shows that just over 636,000 units have been sold there, and we’re starting to get a picture of exactly how successful the Wii U launch actually was. Is this really a slow start for Nintendo’s new console, and how does it compare to other console launches in recent history?

The Wii U launch was a strange one. There was a lot of, well, silence in the run-up to release, and though Nintendo made an effort with the launch advertising campaign, the Wii U wasn’t enormously visible at the end of last year; here in the UK, you barely saw it advertised anywhere, aside from a few TV spots. Our Rich George called the Wii U’s launch year “confusing at best and disappointing at worst”. The expectations for Wii U weren’t astronomically high, tempered by confusion over the two models and these difficult economic times.

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It wasn’t such a strange launch by Nintendo’s standards, though. The publisher has a history of obfuscation and slow starts for its consoles, whether intentional or not – you only have to look back two years to the 3DS’ launch to remind yourself of that, and the Nintendo 64 launch followed a similar pattern. Both those machines had early price cuts, which helped to kick-start their fortunes. I wouldn’t rule out such a possibility for Wii U at this point. Before that, the Wii launch was massively successful sales-wise but disastrous from a manufacturing point of view, as Nintendo was left without any consoles to sell for months at the beginning of 2007.

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Despite a confusing launch, the Wii U’s performance has not been at all bad

In terms of actual numbers, though, despite a pretty confusing launch, the Wii U’s performance has not been at all bad. We got the first whiff of success when GameStop announced its holiday figures earlier this week, and NPD figures tell the same story. 890,000 in the first six weeks is not at all a bad figure, neither is that Japanese first-month number of 636,000. We’re still without European numbers (which are extremely hard to get because of all the different national sales trackers), as Nintendo hasn’t released them, but unless the Wii U has been a total flop in that one territory, we can conservatively estimate sales of around half a million for the UK and Europe. Add in an educated guess at figures from Australia and the rest of the world, and the total global figure can be estimated at somewhere around 2.5 million, perhaps nudging towards 3 million.

It’s an acceptable figure, then, but not an amazing one. It’s definitely not amazing compared to the Wii, which sold 600,000 units in the USA in its first week (the Wii U did 400,000). Countering this, Nintendo has come out with a press release stating that the Wii U has generated more in revenue than the Wii did during its first six weeks - $300 million versus $270 million. The Wii was cheaper, though, so it’s hardly a fair comparison. In Japan, the Wii U and the Wii have had very similar first-month sales – the Wii had sold 544,034 units after three weeks, and the Wii U sold 557,901.

In Europe the Wii sold very successfully, managing 325,000 units in its first two days. It’s here, I think, that we’ll see the biggest discrepancy if and when Nintendo does release figures: UK ChartTrack data indicates that the Wii U launch was a little weaker in Europe than elsewhere.

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Next to other comparable launches – the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 – the Wii U has done better. This is encouraging, as the Wii U is launching into a more challenging market than the PS3 and 360 were back in 2006 and 2007. Ars Technica uses the US sales figures as a comparison, setting 400,000 first-week Wii U systems against 197,000 PS3s and 326,000 Xboxes sold in the first two weeks. In Japan, in the first 3 weeks, digging back through Media Create data, the PS3 only shifted 156,400. Looking at how the PS3 and 360 tracked over the first month of their launches, the Wii U is almost certainly ahead.

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Most home consoles are slow starters.

The PS3 had a disastrous launch, though, plagued by stock confusion and a ridiculous price tag; the console didn’t recover for a good two years. The Xbox was steadier, but again sales didn’t really take off for the console until well into its life. These were more expensive, more technologically advanced consoles at the time, though, which makes direct comparison tricky. Most home consoles are slow starters in terms of sales; in the weeks following the Wii U launch, some reports pointed out that the 360 and even the original Wii were outselling the Wii U by bucketloads, seemingly choosing to ignore that this is completely normal for new consoles, and has been the case for as long as I can remember. The PS2 outsold the PS3 for years, the PSP outsold the Vita, and the DS initially outsold the 3DS.

The games media tends to have an exceptionally short memory when it comes to console launches, as proven by the 3DS and Vita launches the past two years – the 3DS, despite selling moderately well at the beginning of its life and better than the DS did at its launch, was initially deemed a doomed failure by the Internet, whereas the Vita – whose sales figures were painfully low in the initial weeks, especially compared to the PSP’s in 2005 – was lauded as a success in those first months. This is mostly to do with messaging; Sony came up with a decent-sounding 1.2 million number for a positive press release soon after launch, a number that unfortunately didn’t stand up to much investigation. Nintendo was bullish with the 3DS, predicting sales of 4 million 3DS units in the first month (it managed 3.6 million). Now, it’s sold in the region of 27 million and continues to outpace the DS’ sales at the same point in its life cycle.

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Nintendo has been more conservative with the Wii U, forecasting sales of 5.5 million before the end of March this year. Looking at current figures, though, which take Christmas sales into account, that doesn’t look enormously likely – though it is just about achievable.

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The Wii U is currently a moderate success.

The Wii U’s launch was problematic in many ways, from mixed communication to confusion over the two models to an odd absence of visible advertising, but sales wise it is currently a moderate success. Nintendo was always going to suffer from comparisons to the Wii, whose insane initial sales took everyone by surprise (including the manufacturer), but in a modern context the Wii U is doing well. I’m not going to make predictions here – the first year of a console’s life is more of an indication of how it’s going to do than the first month – but claiming that the Wii U is a disappointment at this early stage is wide of the truth.

This has been a real test for the console market – due to the explosion of mobile and the PC renaissance in the past few years, there has been considerable doubt over whether the traditional console model is still viable, and whether people actually want to buy a box to put under their television any more. The Wii U’s launch month suggests that they still do, for now at least. Sony and Microsoft will doubtless be reassured to see so, and Nintendo can enter 2013 in a spirit of cautious optimism.

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK and hopes that she'll have a lot more actual games to play on her Wii U in 2013. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.